Well, it's late. A very happy Remembering What Your Job Is Day to all who celebrate.

In a single sentence, the impact of LLMs on software development: "Same game. Different dice."

If you're struggling to get the code-generating firehose to do what you need, and you're looking at people online claiming they've cracked it, worry not. Just 2 things you need to know: * Contexts should be small and specific * They're very probably lying

The hard part about running a dictatorship is that the past changes so quickly you have no idea what will happen yesterday.

Listening to the latest Celebrities Who Know Each Other podcast. They're talking about stuff. It's sponsored by a VPN provider or an online learning platform or a meal replacement drink or something like that.

Neighbour who claimed 4 parking spaces during the pandemic for their one car has parked across 3 spaces after putting notices on windscreens of cars using the parking spaces that came with their flats. This should be interesting.

The main problem with Big Design Up-Front is that most of what we *really* need to know lies on the feedback side of the development process. Without that feedback, it's all just guesswork.

I get my eyes scanned once a year to check for retinopathy. If the doctors detected a deterioration, those checks would be done more often to monitor its progress. The President has said he's had 3 dementia tests in the recent past.

"Until we get an invasion from Mars, we shall not be tamed by an other species. All we can do is to try to tame ourselves, that an oligarchy tries to tame ourselves, but the oligarchy still remains wild." Aldous Huxley

At the time, I thought this was a cool album. I still think that today, but with less hair. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbiQ...

now, it might seem odd that political commentators who advocated for the uk to leave the eu because of their belief in “the nation state” to be supportive of america’s annexation of venezuela, but what you have to remember is that those people didn’t actually think that, they were lying for money

I'm very much not in the "green builds should be deployed by default" camp. What to do with green builds is a "pull" decision, not a "push" decision. As anyone who's been late for a paid remote meeting because the app was updating might tell you. Remember customers? They were all the rage once.

I'm sorry, I'm calling it. The software industry has lost it's fucking mind.

Yeah, pull the other one LinkedIn

Starmer and Farage both drape themselves in flags but once again it's really clear where their loyalty really is. It's Trump first. They will always be on the side of the super rich and powerful - no matter how heinous the crime. This is not patriotism. It's subservience.

Bearing in mind that they're both playing the keyboard parts at the same time www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsBF...

now we find out if the rest of the world does anything to stop a rogue state, run by narcissists, rich kids, attorneys & podcasters, treating anything or anyone they want like a piñata - i imagine Starmer is in a meeting now checking with his advisors on best way to avoid upsetting the Daily Mail

Starmer just keeps stepping on these rakes.

I've just realised it's Saturday. Aaand you're back in the room.

Marco Rubio is reportedly saying Maduro will stand trial in US courts. Which means it’s now the US administration’s position that US courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the US president, accountable for crimes.

And if the facts are that the US government has broken international law (again), what then?

Hard to believe a FIFA Peace Prize laureate would do this.

Bragging that you just passed your 3rd dementia test is a great way of telling us they've made you take 3 dementia tests

Quite. We do Continuous Delivery, but due to the regulatory and paperwork requirements, tend to only actually release into production every month or so. It was more frequent when we were a larger team and the product was newer, and will be more frequently the next time the business needs it to be

It's worrying how many don't know the difference between Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. Continuous Deployment means that software is deployed whenever it's fit to be deployed - on every green build.

Get ready for Phase Two: a raid on Oslo to seize the Peace Prize.

I can't be 100% sure there isn't an elephant hiding in my fridge. I'm equally unsure that LLMs will never be reliable enough to take experts out of the loop. I mean, it *could* happen, right?

While dev teams celebrate the speed of "AI" coding assistants, business stakeholders are increasingly asking why they're not getting to their destination any faster. Allow me to explain. codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/01/03/t...

On the off-chance that executives actually take an interest in where all that "AI"-generated productivity is going...

Software development, with our heavy reliance on pure anecdote and "feels" to determine what's real and what works, is highly susceptible to market manipulation. For the increasingly desperate makers and backers of hyperscale generative "AI", we're the last chicken in the shop.

Translation: "Stop mentioning the quality!"

the fact that journalists keep asking chatbots to comment on responses they gave to a different user in a different context window on a different computer is so weird. it's like booting up mario and asking mario why he fell in a pit on your friend's nintendo in 1998

This is a thread of major media outlets falsely anthropomorphising the "Grok" chatbot program and in doing so, actively and directly removing responsibility and accountability from individual people working at X who created a child pornography generator (Elon Musk, Nikita Bier etc) #1: Reuters

And what better way to start the new year then join in on our adventure? Join.greenparty.org.uk

Historians hopefully study the present to understand how narratives come to dominate.

The world Silicon Valley has created is exhausting and terrible. We absolutely need better technology, but in the meantime it’s absolutely right to reject what doesn’t serve us and reassess our relationship to digital technology more broadly. disconnect.blog/we-need-to-r...

After 33 years in software development, it's sad to report that the people I've found to be least interested in aligning software development with business objectives, and the most "Ooh, shiny!" of all, are the people in charge.

Looking for some viewing material over the holidays? I recently uploaded two recent talks to my YouTube channel: 1. Testable Architecture: Ya Gotta Keep 'em Separated 2. Event-Sourcing From Scratch Check 'em out, complete with slides and source code, at ted.dev/talks/#past...

The promise of "AI" agents is that we can leave them to get on with complex tasks while we go to the proverbial pub. Then we can check their work after they're done. We've seen this approach before, though... codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/01/02/t...

This is because, for the people politicians really answer to, things *are* getting better.

If you're comparing Test-Driven Development to Type-Driven Development, you're making a category error. Test-Driven Development is, first & foremost, a highly iterative, *usage-driven* approach to software design that discovers the simplest designs that satisfy users' goals.

"Hi. I'm an AI engineer". You engineer AI? "No, I use AI for engineering." Hi. I'm a compiler engineer.

The Planning Game in XP has a rule: if Johnny reckons he can do it quicker than Jane, then Johnny just volunteered to do it. If your CEO/CTO/Head of Engineering comes back to the office on Monday and says "2 weeks?! I could do it in 2 hours using Cursor!", hand them the keyboard and wish them luck.

Awww, bless.

I'm proposing to call any approach where you get an "AI" coding assistant to do a whole bunch of things and *then* check the output for problems "prompt-and-fix" software development. It works about as well as you'd expect for any process that ends with "-and-fix".

They gentrified the tinfoil hat

Well now, there's a rare thing. A satisfying series finale. #StrangerThings

Right then. Stranger Things finale. 2 hours+.

LLMs, it turns out, are a Rorschach test for software developers.